


hold me close and keep me safe

by fardareismai



Series: Imagine Claire and Jamie (Prompts from the blog that I have fulfilled) [10]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Family Drama, Family Feels, Gen, Missing Scene, drums of autumn missing scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 09:01:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5085895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagine Jamie and Bree bonding slowly and Jamie doing his best to help his daughter heal from her own trauma</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold me close and keep me safe

There was a quiet, pitiful moaning that woke me.  It was a sound with which I was horribly familiar- the sound of a soul in torment- and I sat up in bed, prepared to fight Jamie’s demons as I had been doing for years.

It wasn’t Jamie, however.  He was not in the bed beside me and, I realized, the whimpering voice was not his low rumble, but high and sweet as a bell.

Brianna.

I was nearly out of bed when I saw that Jamie was there before me.  He shook his head at me, and I subsided, watching.

“ **Brianna** ,” Jamie said, softly in that Highland way he had- extending the first syllable and nearly swallowing the second.  “ **Brianna, lass, wake up.  It’s only a dream.** ”  


He reached out to touch her.  I could have told him not to do it, but he wasn’t looking at me.  All of his attention was for her.

She came awake violently with a flurry of fists and shout of rage and horror.

“ **No!  Don’t touch me!  Don’t _ever_ touch me!**” she wailed.  


Jamie did not move save to take his hand off her shoulder.  Even when one of those flying fists struck his chest, he did not move, just waited her out as patient and hard as Scottish granite or North Carolina oak.

Finally, when Bree was back in the waking world, her eyes opened and seeing, he spoke.

“ **It’s all right, lass.  It’ll be all right.  I promise.** ”  


That did her in.  She fell forward into his arms, weeping.  


“ **I want him dead,** ” she snuffled into his shoulder.  “ **I want to kill him.** ”  


“ **Nay lass,** ” he said, stroking that long red mane, so like his own.  “ **Nay, you’ll not kill him.** ”  


Brianna did not know him as I did and, preoccupied as she was with her own pain, did not hear the odd inflection that he added to the word “you.”

No, Jamie Fraser would not allow his daughter’s soul to be sullied by the death of her tormenter.  His own battered soul, however, could take it.

And what of me, I wondered.  I who had been the steward of that soul for more years than seemed possible some days.  I, as well, to whose keeping Brianna’s soul had been given some twenty-five years before, in the month before the world fell apart around her father and I.  I, who was healer, lover, mother, and friend.  Could my soul accept the blemish of Stephen Bonnet’s death?

Yes, I thought then.  Yes it could.  I, like Jamie, would accept Hell itself to smooth the lines of worry from the forehead of our daughter.

But for now, as Jamie held his daughter close, rocking her against his chest like an infant, we needn’t worry.  Our souls were clean and there was peace.


End file.
